Friday, July 22, 2016

Freedom of Mind

Independence
Day Thoughts

July 6, 2016

Freedom, something not everyone has, but one of the privileges we were blessed
to get.
Since it’s still around the time of the 4th of July, a.k.a. Independence Day, I
thought it would be most appropriate to address freedom. Oxford Dictionaries
defines freedom as ‘the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants
without hindrance or restraint.’ When looking at freedom, it gets ‘measured’ in
many different ways. For example, when someone has a later curfew or no curfew,
they have more freedom than someone who has an earlier one. By dissecting the
definition of freedom, I realized it’s separated into ‘branches.’ The ‘freedom
to speak’ branch consists of things like this blog or newspapers where we can
speak our mind freely. The one that really stuck out to me was the freedom to
think. I’ve just always had the luxury of and encouragement to think as I
please and yes while my thoughts have been influenced by certain people or
things at times, I’m still free to think as I wish. It really made me think.
How can someone not have the luxury to think freely? That question brought up
additional points and questions. One thought I had was that your mind is
something that no one can tap into. Your thoughts are yours and yours alone, so
why does the definition of freedom include the freedom to think?
Of course there are places that force certain beliefs, morals, etc. upon many.
Some places also restrain people’s freedom so that is also understandable as to
why freedom to think comes into play. However, besides this, I couldn’t really
think of why someone would be restrained from thinking their own way. However,
there’s a bigger picture that I didn’t see right away…
We’ve all experienced negative thoughts. Thoughts that were self-initiated or
initiated from someone’s or your own words and they greatly affected our
self-esteem. Some struggle with low self-esteem more than others, but we all
hit low points. When we don’t give ourselves the freedom to think as we please
we struggle. This is absolutely bizarre. We restrain ourselves. As someone who
definitely struggled with self-confidence, and ultimately self-esteem, I can
tell you that the thought of holding myself back is absolutely mind boggling. I
restrained myself from fully being me because I was far more concerned with what
others thought of me then I was of acting like myself. When I was worried about
other’s thoughts more than my own, I wasn’t really happy. Going back to the
definition of freedom, specifically the freedom of thought, maybe there is an
implication of freeing one’s self to think freely? Or maybe a deeper message
can be taken from it like being true to who you are and taking other’s thoughts
like a grain of salt? I’m also reading very far into it and this may not be the
case at all, but this was still rather intriguing and thought provoking.
Now, rewind a bit to the part of not being happy when not acting like yourself.
Since we hold ourselves back from acting like our true selves, we hold back our
happiness. I finally realized though as I got a little older that I was
happiest when I was me and cared more about what I thought then I did about
what others thought. The big picture in this is that we shouldn’t hold
ourselves back. We really should free ourselves and free our mind so that we
may let thoughts flow as we please. If we have the freedom of mind WE can
control it to think on those things that are pure and lovely and noble.